The Witch-Craze and the Witch-Cult

01 Jul 1997 12:28

Was there a witch-cult? More precisely, were (at least some) of the people
persecuted as witches followers of a pre-Christian religion (or religions)
which had gone underground after the conversions? Many people think so, but
apparently this notion began in the last century, and is without foundation.
Norman Cohn,
in Europe's Inner Demons,
rips into the supposed evidence with great vigor, and Trevor-Roper's excellent
essay "The European Witch-Craze of the 16th and 17th Centuries" (reprinted in a
book of the same title) makes the astute points that, first, the Church didn't
go crazy about witch-craft until, precisely, the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, by which point every western European country had been Christianized
for several centuries at least --- and the Church was split; and, second, the
intensity of witch-hunting in a given region was very strongly correlated with
how long it had been since it last changed hands in the wars of religion.

The best cases for an actual witch-cult or cults are supposed to be made by
Carlo Ginzburg, Ecstacies and The Night Battles,
which I've not read; Cohn disputes Ginzburg's conclusions, but praises his
data. There seems to be exactly no evidence that the witches were
followers of a single great goddess.

Supposing there was no witch-cult, why did Europeans turn to that
form of violent craziness, at that time? If there was a witch-cult,
why didn't the Church do anything about it before then?

And where did that 9 million figure that's floating around come from? It's
much, much larger than anything I've seen in mainstream historians. Briggs,
for instance, in his excellent book says "the most reasonable modern estimates
suggest perhaps 100,000 trials between 1450 and 1750, with something between
40,000 and 50,000 executions, of which 20 to 25 per cent were of men" (in some
regions, he shows, most witches were men) --- so where did that other number,
off by two orders of magnitude, come from?

Recommended:

Robin Briggs, Witches and Neighbors: The Social and Cultural
Contexts of European Witchcraft

Norman Cohn, Europe's Inner Demons

Hugh Trevor-Roper, The European Witch-Craze of the 16th and
17th Centuries

To read:

Julio Carlo Baroja, The World of the Witches

Hans Peter Broedel, The Malleus Maleficarum and
the Construction of Witchcraft